i'm basically against blogs&personal pages. there is enough vanity in the world to add my ego on the net...
here there are thoughts and reflections and some pieces of a novel which will never come to life.
so, if you like me think that humanity does not need my self-righteous quotes, you can just check the pictures and travellers advices i will post here...
thanx for coming, anyway...!

Sunday, June 8, 2008

yesterday i was updating the "Events" page on our website (http://www.uaetouristlinks.com/) and i found out there is an exhibition going on in Sharjah which has not been widely promoted (as they usually do...) till now.

and it's nothing less but an exhibition of pictures by Steve McCurry, one of the most famous photograpers on earth, mostrly known for his coverage of Afghanistan and for some beautiful works he did in Tibet, India and Nepal for National Geographic magazine.

i'm sure that when you will look at the picture below, you will recognize his work!

picture has been taken by Steve McCurry in Peshawar (Pakistan) in 1984 among the Afghan refugees and it has been on the cover of National Geographic and other publications (and it won some prestigious photographic prizes...). in 2002 McCurry went back to Peshawar to find the Afghan girl in the picture and his reportage on her story is also featured in the Sharjah exhibition.the exhibition "Face of Asia" will be hosted by Sharjah Art Museum (tel. +971 6 5695050) until 15th June.on friday i MUST go to Sharjah!McCurry started covering Afghanistan during the Russian invasion and, since then, he returned many times to the Country. he also covered the Iran-Iraq war, the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, Beirut and the Gulf War, plus many other Countries especially in Asia (Cambodia, Tibet, India, Nepal, Sri-Lanka, Philippines) and 9/11 in New York.

now McCurry is covering Afghanistan again (where he established Imagine Asia, an educational project together with some NGOs) and on February issue of National Geographic magazine there was a beautiful reportage he made with Phil Zabriskie among Hazara students in Bamyan (here). of course after reading The Kite Runner the whole world is now interested in Afghanistan and everybody know who the Hazaras are, but CHAPEAU! to someone like Steve McCurry who risks his life daily to let us know more about one of the unknown (and beautiful) countries in the world... even without the advertising of Sharjah Museums Authority!

A good address for those wishing to visit Dubai and the United Arab Emirates

A. Alex. Alexandria. A mix of people, languages, religions and cultures living in a city which is a mix of styles, histories and traditions laying on a sea which is a mix of people, languages, religions and cultures. The place i would like to spend the rest of my life. The place i would like to be right now. The place my heart is right now. Alexandria. Alex. A. K.

22 million inhabitants! 22 millions! Cairo is a city, but it could easily be a Country on its own: more than 1/3 of Italy’s inhabitants...Or it could easily be a world on its own, given the range of lives one can find there: 22 million of existences each different from the other. And all these 22 millions seems to gather on the freeway just when you have to go from an edge of the city to the other... in practice every morning, to go to school.If hell would have a circle of the drivers, it would be Cairo flyover during summer.But Cairo is not only a city, it is a mental status: the time spent in Cairo appears to me as hung on the whole of times creating world memory. Cairo is a city suspended in the desert and living in Cairo was like living a life suspended in time. It was like living in a bubble, completely out of the Western space-time concept. I felt a kind of goldfish in a dry spot, surrounded by a multitude of other fishes already evolved in a darwinian way to garantee their survival by adapting to the enviroment. But I couldn’t adapt so easily, I was too astonished by that huge bubble I was living in and where actually the time had stopped: in an half hour I could shift from the Pyramids to a wild traffic jam, to the peacefullness of al-Azhar, to the over-crowded City of Dead to a perfectly American-style disco. And outside, desert only.